Why Wanderlei Silva can't end on good news, even though he should

Maybe somewhere in that cavernous hall, the old memories of Wanderlei Silva’s former glories are still floating around, whispering stories about when it was 10 years ago and the last thing any fighter wanted to see standing on the other side of the PRIDE ring was Silva, rolling his wrists in a menacing bit of pre-fight calisthenics as he watched his victim out of the tops of his eyes. It wasn’t so long ago, the ghosts say. Who says it couldn’t happen again, they ask, if only just this once?

Somewhere between the opening screeches of “Sandstorm” and the dull leather thud of the first hook hammering home, Silva heard the ghosts talking. Go forth and stand and bang, they told him. Silva did, and he saw that it was good. Brian Stann did too, and the last thing he saw was Silva’s right hand.

“I don’t know what happens in Japan, but it makes me feel young,” Silva said at the UFC on FUEL TV 8 post-fight press conference.

But feeling young and being young are two different things. We’ve all seen how one fight can make you old in this sport. It’s rare for it to work the same way in reverse.

The facts on Wanderlei Silva look like this: He’s 36 years old (at least in people years; in fighter years his battles have made him much, much older), he hasn’t won two fights in a row since 2006, and he’s fresh off a knockout win over Stann that would make for an absolutely perfect fight to end his career on.

OK, so that last one is opinion rather than fact, but you know it’s true. Can you imagine a more Wanderlei-tastic final fight? He got to walk out one last time in Saitama Super Arena, and then he got to spend the first round brawling with Stann in a defense-free fight in which each took turns hooking the other off his feet. As if that wasn’t enough, he also got to win, and in violent “Axe Murderer” fashion. A couple murderous right hands, his opponent goes limp, and the crowd goes wild. Freeze on the scene of Silva jumping on the cage to celebrate with his public. Fade to black.

You simply don’t get endings that perfect in the fight business, at least not in real life. But then, maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe it’s because the kinds of fighters who get there in the first place – fighters like Silva, who are a rare breed to begin with – just can’t end on good news.

It’s not hard to understand why. Professional cage fighters are a self-selecting group. This sport weeds out the quitters very early on, and then it gets started on the overly rational forward-thinkers. The people who wonder if maybe they shouldn’t keep pummeling the skull of another human being with their already broken and rapidly swelling hand? The ones who get knocked out and don’t wake up with the word “rematch” on their lips? Yeah, they don’t typically last long in this sport. To become a legend like Silva in the first place, you have to possess a certain kind of mindset. You have to calculate physical risks and rewards in ways that most people would regard as flawed, if not downright grotesque.

You have to be special, in other words, which Silva most definitely is. Now it’s that very same specialness that’s keeping him from cashing in his chips after his latest bet has paid off big.

“I’m fighting one fight at a time right now,” Silva said after his win over Stann.

Translation: I’m probably going to keep doing this until something genuinely awful happens to me, and even then you’ll need a tractor to drag me away.

You can’t really blame him, can you? A couple years ago, we said he was done, washed-up, his chin long gone and his power nothing more than the fading echo of his youth. Now look. He might have staggered and stumbled through Stann’s haymakers, but he was still conscious and clear-eyed even after wading into the fray with his hands nowhere near his own face. It’s as if the plastic surgeon who gave him a new face also threw in a fresh chin at no extra charge. Who’s to say he doesn’t have a few more of these magical nights left in him?

The trouble is, if you can’t walk away when you’re winning, you end up sticking around until you’ve had more than your fill of losing. And when you have a style like Silva’s, which courts disaster even in victory, you almost can’t help but invite the kind of damage that can’t be undone with surgery or rehab. That’s the fear, isn’t it? That Wanderlei will prove to be way too Wanderlei for his own good? Maybe he already is.

History tells us that this is how it usually goes with great fighters. Too bad it doesn’t tell them. Or rather, too bad that when it does tell them, they rarely seem to get the message on time. After all, who wants to listen to those dreary warnings about a hypothetical future when you’re so busy celebrating the glorious present? Who could even hear them over the roar of the Saitama Super Arena crowd and the whispers of the ghosts?